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Troy Patterson

Trouble with Rubrics - 0 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...rubrics.htm

blog.me rubrics msm290 assessment education rubric

shared by Troy Patterson on 07 Dec 14 - Cached
  • She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now seemed “unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value.  Worse than that,” she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”[5]
  • This is the sort of outcome that may not be noticed by an assessment specialist who is essentially a technician, in search of practices that yield data in ever-greater quantities.
  • The fatal flaw in this logic is revealed by a line of research in educational psychology showing that students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.
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  • it’s shortsighted to assume that an assessment technique is valuable in direct proportion to how much information it provides.
  • Studies have shown that too much attention to the quality of one’s performance is associated with more superficial thinking, less interest in whatever one is doing, less perseverance in the face of failure, and a tendency to attribute the outcome to innate ability and other factors thought to be beyond one’s control.
  • As one sixth grader put it, “The whole time I’m writing, I’m not thinking about what I’m saying or how I’m saying it.  I’m worried about what grade the teacher will give me, even if she’s handed out a rubric.  I’m more focused on being correct than on being honest in my writing.”[8]
  • she argues, assessment is “stripped of the complexity that breathes life into good writing.”
  • High scores on a list of criteria for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the essay is any good because quality is more than the sum of its rubricized parts.
  • Wilson also makes the devastating observation that a relatively recent “shift in writing pedagogy has not translated into a shift in writing assessment.”
  • Teachers are given much more sophisticated and progressive guidance nowadays about how to teach writing but are still told to pigeonhole the results, to quantify what can’t really be quantified.
  • Consistent and uniform standards are admirable, and maybe even workable, when we’re talking about, say, the manufacture of DVD players.  The process of trying to gauge children’s understanding of ideas is a very different matter, however.
  • Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they’re doing is exact and objective. 
  • The appeal of rubrics is supposed to be their high interrater reliability, finally delivered to language arts.
  • Just as it’s possible to raise standardized test scores as long as you’re willing to gut the curriculum and turn the school into a test-preparation factory, so it’s possible to get a bunch of people to agree on what rating to give an assignment as long as they’re willing to accept and apply someone else’s narrow criteria for what merits that rating. 
  • Once we check our judgment at the door, we can all learn to give a 4 to exactly the same things.
Ron King

John Hattie - Visible Learning - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by Ron King on 13 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 13 Mar 13
     
    Edited highlights of a talk by John Hattie where he outlines some of the most successful methods to promote learning. To join a network of teachers who aim to put evidence into practice, visit www.ebtn.org.uk For training sessions by Mike Bell in the UK on evidence-based classroom methods visit www.educationevidence.com or contact mikebell@educationevidence.com For training in John Hattie's 'Visible Learning Plus': In the UK: Osiris Educational www.osiriseducational.co.uk In the USA: Lead and Learn www.leadandlearn.com In Scandinavia: JN Partnership www.challenginglearning.com In Australia: Macmillan Professional Learning www.macmillanprofessionallearning.com.au
Troy Patterson

16 Modern Realities Schools (and Parents) Need to Accept. Now. - Modern Learning - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...eed-to-accept-now-64b98710e4e9

msm332

shared by Troy Patterson on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • What’s happened to get people thinking and talking about “different” instead of “better?”
  • The Web and the technologies that drive it are fundamentally changing the way we think about how we can learn and become educated in a globally networked and connected world. It has absolutely exploded our ability to learn on our own in ways that schools weren’t built for.
  • In that respect, current systems of schooling are an increasingly significant barrier to progress when it comes to learning.
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  • The middleman is vanishing as peer to peer interactions flourish. Teachers no longer stand between the content and the student. This will change the nature of the profession.
  • Technology is no longer an option when it comes to learning at mastery levels.
  • Curriculum is just a guess, and now that we have access to so much information and knowledge, the current school curriculum bucket represents (as Seymour Papert suggests) “one-billionth of one percent” of all there is to know. Our odds of choosing the “right” mix for all of our kids’ futures are infinitesimal.
  • The skills, literacies, and dispositions required to navigate this increasingly complex and change filled world are much different from those stressed in the current school curriculum.
  • In fact, instead of being delivered by an institution, curriculum is now constructed and negotiated in real time by learner and the contributions of those engaged in the learning process, whether in the classroom our out.
  • “High stakes” learning is now about doing real work for real audiences, not taking a standardized subject matter test.
  • While important, the 4Cs of creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication are no longer enough. Being able to connect to other learners worldwide and to use computing applications to solve problems are the two additional “Cs” required in the modern world.
  • Our children will live and work in a much more transparent world as tools to publish pictures, video, and texts become more accessible and more ubiquitous. Their online reputations must be built and managed.
  • Workers in the future will not “find employment;” Employment will find them. Or they will create their own.
  • Embracing and adapting to change must be in the modern skill set.
Troy Patterson

Updating Data-Driven Instruction and the Practice of Teaching | Larry Cuban on School R... - 0 views

larrycuban.wordpress.com/...n-and-the-practice-of-teaching

msm292 reform data

shared by Troy Patterson on 27 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • I am talking about data-driven instruction–a way of making teaching less subjective, more objective, less experience-based, more scientific.
  • Data-driven instruction, advocates say, is scientific and consistent with how successful businesses have used data for decades to increase their productivity.
  • Of course, teachers had always assessed learning informally before state- and district-designed tests. Teachers accumulated information (oops! data) from pop quizzes, class discussions, observing students in pairs and small groups, and individual conferences.
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  • Based on these data, teachers revised lessons. Teachers leaned heavily on their experience with students and the incremental learning they had accumulated from teaching 180 days, year after year.
  • Teachers’ informal assessments of students gathered information directly and  would lead to altered lessons.
  • In the 1990s and, especially after No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, the electronic gathering of data, disaggregating information by groups and individuals, and then applying lessons learned from analysis of tests and classroom practices became a top priority.
  • Now, principals and teachers are awash in data.
  • How do teachers use the massive data available to them on student performance?
  • studied four elementary school grade-level teams in how they used data to improve lessons. She found that supportive principals and superintendents and habits of collaboration increased use of data to alter lessons in two of the cases but not in the other two.
  • Julie Marsh and her colleagues found 15 where teachers used annual tests, for example, in basic ways to target weaknesses in professional development or to schedule double periods of language arts for English language learners.
  • These researchers admitted, however, that they could not connect student achievement to the 36 instances of basic to complex data-driven decisions  in these two districts.
  • Of these studies, the expert panel found 64 that used experimental or quasi-experimental designs and only six–yes, six–met the Institute of Education Sciences standard for making causal claims about data-driven decisions improving student achievement. When reviewing these six studies, however, the panel found “low evidence” (rather than “moderate” or “strong” evidence) to support data-driven instruction. In short, the assumption that data-driven instructional decisions improve student test scores is, well, still an assumption not a fact.
  • Numbers may be facts. Numbers may be objective. Numbers may smell scientific. But we give meaning to these numbers. Data-driven instruction may be a worthwhile reform but as an evidence-based educational practice linked to student achievement, rhetoric notwithstanding, it is not there yet.
Ron King

Standards Based Grading: District-Wide Journey - 1 views

mctownsley.blogspot.com/...sed-grading-district-wide.html

shared by Ron King on 07 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 07 Apr 13
     
    It's a pretty exciting time to work in my current school district. About twenty years ago, the elementary school implemented a standards-based report card. Over the past several years, we've seen a grassroots movement in the area of assessment and grading reform in our secondary buildings. Dozens of teachers and building leadership teams have visited and/or inquired about what's going on in our high school and middle school, which is one of the reasons we'll soon be co-hosting a standards-based grading conference in eastern Iowa (before you ask, we've reached our registration capacity and the waiting list has been closed as well).
Troy Patterson

Hybrid Classes Outlearn Traditional Classes -- THE Journal - 0 views

thejournal.com/...learn-traditional-classes.aspx

msm291

shared by Troy Patterson on 20 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Students in hybrid classrooms outperformed their peers in traditional classes in all grades and subjects, according to the newest study from two organizations that work with schools in establishing hybrid instruction.
  • The results come out of those classes where students either took the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests or Keystone Exams to measure academic achievement.
  • In one example, hybrid learning eighth grade math students at Hatboro-Horsham School District (PA) passed the PSSA tests and Keystone Exams at a rate10 percent higher than their non-hybrid peers in five schools.
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  • In another example, third grade math students in the hybrid learning program at Pennsylvania's Indiana Area School District outperformed students in traditional classes by 10 percentage points on the PSSA exams.
  • scored proficient or advanced on PSSA tests at a rate 23 percent higher than the previous year with gains in all subjects: reading (up 20 percent), math (up 24 percent) and science (up 27 percent).
  • "We use a rigorous accountability system that helps us measure and report on hybrid classroom outcomes," said Dellicker President and CEO Kevin Dellicker.
  • The cost of implementing hybrid learning through the Institute's model could be considered modest. During the 2013-2014 school year, according to the report, the schools spent an average of $220 per student (not including computing devices) to transform their learning models.
Troy Patterson

The Sabermetrics of Effort - Jonah Lehrer - 0 views

www.jonahlehrer.com/...the-sabermetrics-of-effort

msm299 blog.me

shared by Troy Patterson on 17 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The fundamental premise of Moneyball is that the labor market of sports is inefficient, and that many teams systematically undervalue particular athletic skills that help them win. While these skills are often subtle – and the players that possess them tend to toil in obscurity - they can be identified using sophisticated statistical techniques, aka sabermetrics. Home runs are fun. On-base percentage is crucial.
  • The wisdom of the moneyball strategy is no longer controversial. It’s why the A’s almost always outperform their payroll,
  • However, the triumph of moneyball creates a paradox, since its success depends on the very market inefficiencies it exposes. The end result is a relentless search for new undervalued skills, those hidden talents that nobody else seems to appreciate. At least not yet.
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  •  One study found that baseball players significantly improved their performance in the final year of their contracts, just before entering free-agency. (Another study found a similar trend among NBA players.) What explained this improvement? Effort. Hustle. Blood, sweat and tears. The players wanted a big contract, so they worked harder.
  • If a player runs too little during a game, it’s not because his body gives out – it’s because his head doesn’t want to.
  • despite the obvious impact of effort, it’s surprisingly hard to isolate as a variable of athletic performance. Weimer and Wicker set out to fix this oversight. Using data gathered from three seasons and 1514 games of the Bundesliga – the premier soccer league in Germany – the economists attempted to measure individual effort as a variable of player performance,
  • So did these differences in levels of effort matter? The answer is an emphatic yes: teams with players that run longer distances are more likely to win the game,
  • As the economists note, “teams where some players run a lot while others are relatively lazy have a higher winning probability.”
  • There is a larger lesson here, which is that our obsession with measuring talent has led us to neglect the measurement of effort. This is a blind spot that extends far beyond the realm of professional sports.
  • Maximum tests are high-stakes assessments that try to measure a person’s peak level of performance. Think here of the SAT, or the NFL Combine, or all those standardized tests we give to our kids. Because these tests are relatively short, we assume people are motivated enough to put in the effort while they’re being measured. As a result, maximum tests are good at quantifying individual talent, whether it’s scholastic aptitude or speed in the 40-yard dash.
  • Unfortunately, the brevity of maximum tests means they are not very good at predicting future levels of effort. Sackett has demonstrated this by comparing the results from maximum tests to field studies of typical performance, which is a measure of how people perform when they are not being tested.
  • As Sackett came to discover, the correlation between these two assessments is often surprisingly low: the same people identified as the best by a maximum test often unperformed according to the measure of typical performance, and vice versa.
  • What accounts for the mismatch between maximum tests and typical performance? One explanation is that, while maximum tests are good at measuring talent, typical performance is about talent plus effort.
  • In the real world, you can’t assume people are always motivated to try their hardest. You can’t assume they are always striving to do their best. Clocking someone in a sprint won’t tell you if he or she has the nerve to run a marathon, or even 12 kilometers in a soccer match.
  • With any luck, these sabermetric innovations will trickle down to education, which is still mired in maximum high-stakes tests that fail to directly measure or improve the levels of effort put forth by students.
  • After all, those teams with the hardest workers (and not just the most talented ones) significantly increase their odds of winning.
  • Old-fashioned effort just might be the next on-base percentage.
Troy Patterson

The Test of the Common Core | E. D. Hirsch, Jr. - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...mmon-core-tests_b_3824859.html

msm258 commoncore

shared by Troy Patterson on 12 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Here's the follow-up post to "Why I'm For the Common Core." It explains why we should be leery of the forthcoming "core-aligned" tests -- especially those in English Language Arts that people are rightly anxious about.
  • These tests could endanger the promise of the Common Core.
  • The first thing I'd want to do if I were younger would be to launch an effective court challenge to value-added teacher evaluations on the basis of test scores in reading comprehension. The value-added approach to teacher evaluation in reading is unsound both technically and in its curriculum-narrowing effects. The connection between job ratings and tests in ELA has been a disaster for education.
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  • My analysis of them showed what anyone immersed in reading research would have predicted: The value-added data are modestly stable for math, but are fuzzy and unreliable for reading.
  • Math tests are based on the school curriculum. What a teacher does in the math classroom affects student test scores. But reading-comprehension tests are not based on the school curriculum. (How could they be if there's no set curriculum?) Rather, they are based on the general knowledge that students have gained over their life span from all sources -- most of them outside the school.
  • The whole project is unfair to teachers, ill-conceived, and educationally disastrous. The teacher-rating scheme has usurped huge amounts of teaching time in anxious test-prep. Paradoxically, the evidence shows that test-prep ceases to be effective after about six lessons.
  • the inadequate theories of reading-comprehension that have dominated the schools -- mainly the unfounded theory that, when students reach a certain level of "reading skill," they can read anything at that level.
  • The Common Core-aligned tests of reading comprehension will naturally contain text passages and questions about those passages. To the extent such tests claim to assess "critical thinking" and "general" reading-comprehension skill, we should hold on to our wallets. They will be only rough indexes of reading ability -- probably no better than the perfectly adequate and well-validated reading tests they mean to replace.
  • The solution to the test-prep conundrum is this: First, institute in every participating state the specific and coherent curriculum that the Common Core Standards explicitly call for. (It's passing odd to introduce "Common Core" tests before there's an actual core to be tested.)
Troy Patterson

What poor children need in school - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...t-poor-children-need-in-school

msm259

shared by Troy Patterson on 19 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Most educational policy elites, whether in government or in the nonprofit sector, mean well.
  • Yet policymakers tend to come from a relatively privileged slice of American society.  And they tend to possess a set of beliefs and assumptions distinct to their background. 
  • But in most cases, the fact that decision-makers inhabit a different world from students—and particularly, poor students—is a matter of great significance.
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  • Poverty limits opportunity in all senses.  It restricts career paths, as policymakers recognize.  But it also denies young people equal time, resources, and exposure to discover their interests and foster their passions.  It constrains lives.
  • Schools, of course, did not create this problem.  But they do exacerbate it.  Over the past decade, well-intended policymakers concerned with closing the achievement gap have promoted policies and practices that reduce learning to something easily quantified.
  • Reformers need to understand that their narrow efforts to close the quantifiable “achievement gap” are creating another kind of educational inequity.  In other words, as they seek to close one gap they are opening up another.
  • Concerned only with the cultivation of ostensibly job-oriented knowledge and skills, they have neglected everything else that makes schools great. 
  • Our best schools are places where children gain confidence in themselves, build healthy relationships, and develop values congruent with their own self-interest.  They are places of play and laughter and discovery.
  • For contemporary education reformers, improving test scores is the only measure of school quality that matters.  And they have had some modest successes in this regard.  Yet they have merely reshuffled the deck. 
Troy Patterson

Homework: An unnecessary evil? … Surprising findings from new research - The ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ing-findings-from-new-research

msm286 homework

shared by Troy Patterson on 04 Oct 14 - No Cached
  •  A brand-new study on the academic effects of homework offers not only some intriguing results but also a lesson on how to read a study — and a reminder of the importance of doing just that:  reading studies (carefully) rather than relying on summaries by journalists or even by the researchers themselves.
  • First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school.  In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement.  If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.
  • Second, even at the high school level, the research supporting homework hasn’t been particularly persuasive.
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  • It’s easy to miss one interesting result in this study that appears in a one-sentence aside.  When kids in these two similar datasets were asked how much time they spent on math homework each day, those in the NELS study said 37 minutes, whereas those in the ELS study said 60 minutes. 
  • it was statistically significant but “very modest”:  Even assuming the existence of a causal relationship, which is by no means clear, one or two hours’ worth of homework every day buys you two or three points on a test.
  • There was no relationship whatsoever between time spent on homework and course grade, and “no substantive difference in grades between students who complete homework and those who do not.”
  • The better the research, the less likely one is to find any benefits from homework.
  • you’ll find that there’s not much to prop up the belief that students must be made to work a second shift after they get home from school.  The assumption that teachers are just assigning homework badly, that we’d start to see meaningful results if only it were improved, is harder and harder to justify with each study that’s published.
  • many people will respond to these results by repeating platitudes about the importance of practice[8], or by complaining that anyone who doesn’t think kids need homework is coddling them and failing to prepare them for the “real world” (read:  the pointless tasks they’ll be forced to do after they leave school).
Troy Patterson

Differentiation Doesn't Work - Education Week - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...fferentiation-doesnt-work.html

msm294 differentiation education

shared by Troy Patterson on 06 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Let's review the educational cure-alls of past decades: back to basics, the open classroom, whole language, constructivism, and E.D. Hirsch's excruciatingly detailed accounts of what every 1st or 3rd grader should know, to name a few.
  • Starting with the gifted-education community in the late 1960s, differentiation didn't get its mojo going until regular educators jumped onto the bandwagon in the 1980s.
  • Differentiation is a failure, a farce, and the ultimate educational joke played on countless educators and students.
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  • In theory, differentiation sounds great, as it takes several important factors of student learning into account: • It seeks to determine what students already know and what they still need to learn. • It allows students to demonstrate what they know through multiple methods. • It encourages students and teachers to add depth and complexity to the learning/teaching process.
  • Although fine in theory, differentiation in practice is harder to implement in a heterogeneous classroom than it is to juggle with one arm tied behind your back.
  • 'We couldn't answer the question ... because no one was actually differentiating,'
  • "In every case, differentiated instruction seemed to complicate teachers' work, requiring them to procure and assemble multiple sets of materials, … and it dumbed down instruction."
  • It seems that, when it comes to differentiation, teachers are either not doing it at all, or beating themselves up for not doing it as well as they're supposed to be doing it. Either way, the verdict is clear: Differentiation is a promise unfulfilled, a boondoggle of massive proportions.
  • The biggest reason differentiation doesn't work, and never will, is the way students are deployed in most of our nation's classrooms.
  • It seems to me that the only educators who assert that differentiation is doable are those who have never tried to implement it themselves: university professors, curriculum coordinators, and school principals.
  • Differentiation is a cheap way out for school districts to pay lip service to those who demand that each child be educated to his or her fullest potential.
  • Do we expect an oncologist to be able to treat glaucoma?
  • Do we expect a criminal prosecutor to be able to decipher patent law?
  • Do we expect a concert pianist to be able to play the clarinet equally well?
  • No, no, no.
  • However, when the education of our nation's young people is at stake, we toss together into one classroom every possible learning strength and disability and expect a single teacher to be able to work academic miracles with every kid … as long as said teacher is willing to differentiate, of course.
  • A second reason that differentiation has been a failure is that we're not exactly sure what it is we are differentiating: Is it the curriculum or the instructional methods used to deliver it? Or both?
  • The terms "differentiated instruction" and "differentiated curriculum" are used interchangeably, yet they are not synonyms.
  • Differentiation might have a chance to work if we are willing, as a nation, to return to the days when students of similar abilities were placed in classes with other students whose learning needs paralleled their own. Until that time, differentiation will continue to be what it has become: a losing proposition for both students and teachers, and yet one more panacea that did not pan out.
Troy Patterson

Curiosity Is a Unique Marker of Academic Success - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534573

msm365 motivation teaching

shared by Troy Patterson on 27 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Yet in actual schools, curiosity is drastically underappreciated.
  • The power of curiosity to contribute not only to high achievement, but also to a fulfilling existence, cannot be emphasized enough.
  • When Orville Wright, of the Wright brothers fame, was told by a friend that he and his brother would always be an example of how far someone can go in life with no special advantages, he emphatically responded, “to say we had no special advantages … the greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”
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  • They initiated their study in 1979, and have been assessing the participants based on a wide range of variables (e.g., school performance, IQ, leadership, happiness) across multiple contexts (laboratory and home) since.
  • Cognitive giftedness matters.
  • While intellectually gifted children were not different than the comparison group with respect to their temperament, behavioral, social, or emotional functioning, they did differ in regards to their advanced sensory and motor functioning starting at age 1.5, their ability to understand the meaning of words starting at age 1, and their ability to both understand and communicate information thereafter.
  • Parents of intellectually gifted children reported similar observations and were more likely than those of average children to say that their kids actively elicited stimulation by, for example, requesting intellectual extracurricular activities.
  • The researchers also measured what they described as academic intrinsic motivation and identified the top 19 percent of the 111 adolescent participants as “motivationally gifted,” displaying extreme enjoyment of school and of learning of challenging, difficult, and novel tasks and an orientation toward mastery, curiosity, and persistence.
  • Interestingly, they found very little correspondence between intellectual giftedness and motivational giftedness.
  • Students with gifted curiosity outperformed their peers on a wide range of educational outcomes, including math and reading, SAT scores, and college attainment. According to ratings from teachers, the motivationally gifted students worked harder and learned more.
  • suggest that gifted curiosity is a distinct characteristic that contributes uniquely to academic success.
  • “Motivation should not be considered simply a catalyst for the development of other forms of giftedness, but should be nurtured in its own right,”
  • All in all, the Fullerton study is proof that giftedness is not something an individual is either born with or without—giftedness is clearly a developmental process.
  • “giftedness is not a chance event … giftedness will blossom when children’s cognitive ability, motivation and enriched environments coexist and meld together to foster its growth.”
Troy Patterson

Principal: Why our new educator evaluation system is unethical - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...evaluation-system-is-unethical

msm245

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 May 13 - No Cached
  • A few years ago, a student at my high school was having a terrible time passing one of the exams needed to earn a Regents Diploma.
  • Mary has a learning disability that truly impacts her retention and analytical thinking.
  • Because she was a special education student, at the time there was an easier exam available, the RCT, which she could take and then use to earn a local high school diploma instead of the Regents Diploma.
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  • Regents Diploma serves as a motivator for our students while providing an objective (though imperfect) measure of accomplishment.
  • If they do not pass a test the first time, it is not awful if they take it again—we use it as a diagnostic, help them fill the learning gaps, and only the passing score goes on the transcript
  • in Mary’s case, to ask her to take that test yet once again would have been tantamount to child abuse.
  • Mary’s story, therefore, points to a key reason why evaluating teachers and principals by test scores is wrong.
  • It illustrates how the problems with value-added measures of performance go well beyond the technicalities of validity and reliability.
  • The basic rule is this: No measure of performance used for high-stakes purposes should put the best interests of students in conflict with the best interests of the adults who serve them.
  • I will just point out that under that system I may be penalized if future students like Mary do not achieve a 65 on the Regents exam.
  • Mary and I can still make the choice to say “enough”, but it may cost me a “point”, if a majority of students who had the same middle school scores on math and English tests that she did years before, pass the test.
  • But I can also be less concerned about the VAM-based evaluation system because it’s very likely to be biased in favor of those like me who lead schools that have only one or two students like Mary every year.
  • When we have an ELL (English language learner) student with interrupted education arrive at our school, we often consider a plan that includes an extra year of high school.
  • last few years “four year graduation rates” are of high importance
  • four-year graduation rate as a high-stakes measure has resulted in the proliferation of “credit recovery” programs of dubious quality, along with teacher complaints of being pressured to pass students with poor attendance and grades, especially in schools under threat of closure.
  • On the one hand, they had a clear incentive to “test prep” for the recent Common Core exams, but they also knew that test prep was not the instruction that their students needed and deserved.
  • in New York and in many other Race to the Top states, continue to favor “form over substance” and allow the unintended consequences of a rushed models to be put in place.
  • Creating bell curves of relative educator performance may look like progress and science, but these are measures without meaning, and they do not help schools improve.
  • We can raise every bar and continue to add high-stakes measures. Or we can acknowledge and respond to the reality that school improvement takes time, capacity building, professional development, and financial support at the district, state and national levels.
Ron King

Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize - Philip Treisman (NCTM Conference) - 0 views

www.nctm.org/...content.aspx

Equity

shared by Ron King on 23 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 23 Apr 13
     
    NCTM has committed itself to equity, with many of us working toward a new generation of mathematics-savvy citizens and STEM professionals representing our diverse population. We need to take stock of the record and take action from the state house to the classroom, so that our vision becomes reality and our hopes for our students are realized. Philip "Uri" Treisman is professor of mathematics and of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he directs the Charles A. Dana Center. He is a senior adviser to the Aspen Institute's Urban Superintendents' Network and recently served on the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992 for his work on nurturing minority student achievement in college mathematics and 2006 Scientist of the Year by the Harvard Foundation of Harvard University for his outstanding contributions to mathematics. In all his work, Treisman advocates for equity and excellence in education for all children. Philip Uri Treisman Charles A. Dana Center, University of Texas at Austin
Ron King

Phillips Exeter Academy | Hands On Math - 0 views

www.exeter.edu/...7327_7401.aspx

Hands On Exeter math

shared by Ron King on 03 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 03 Aug 12
     
    The Exeter Mathematics Institute courses are tailored and designed for the needs of each school district. These sample course descriptions are examples of courses that have been offered in various school districts over the years. In most of these courses, we use the same Exeter Mathematics Problem Sets that are used during the Exeter school year. In the Geometer's Sketchpad course and in all of the hands-on courses, we use materials that have been specifically developed by Exeter Math Institute instructors. All of these materials are available using the links below
Troy Patterson

Two months in, Eli Broad's new foundation president still learning the ropes | Pass / F... - 0 views

www.scpr.org/...ead-of-philanthropic-education

msm270

shared by Troy Patterson on 08 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • “It would look like a national system,” said Broad, describing what he would see as a perfect education infrastructure. “Rather than having 14,000 school boards across America, it would get governors involved, big city mayors involved, and it would have a longer school day and a longer school year.”
  • It's been a direction fueled by lots of money. In the past 13 years Broad has donated $800 million to education initiatives. A lot of it has gone to charter schools. In 2012, the KIPP charter school group got more than $2 million and Green Dot received $775,000 to supplement public funding. The online tutoring group Khan Academy received $1 million that year, too.
  • Broad has known all along he needs allies in public office to carry out his vision. He's generously donated to elections — from school boards to the U.S. presidency. He leans Democrat in Washington but anti-union on school boards.
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  • After three decades in Washington, Reed says he was ready to leave the political gridlock and lead a results-driven effort such as the Broad Foundation.
  • Troy Patterson on 08 Mar 14
     
    Two months in, Eli Broad's new foundation president still learning the ropes
Troy Patterson

Interactive teaching methods double learning in undergraduate physics class - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...110512150817.htm

msm msm167 learning teaching

shared by Troy Patterson on 15 May 11 - No Cached
  • Interactive teaching methods significantly improved attendance and doubled both engagement and learning in a large physics class,
  • students in the interactive class were nearly twice as engaged as their counterparts in the traditional class
  • scored nearly twice as well in a test designed to determine their grasp of complex physics concepts (average score 74 per cent vs. 41 per cent, with random guessing producing a score of 23 per cent). Attendance in the interactive class also increased by 20 per cent during the experiment.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • During the experimental week, Deslauriers and Schelew gave no formal lecturing but guided students through a series of activities that had previously been shown to enhance learning, such as paired and small-group discussions and active learning tasks, which included the use of remote-control "clickers" to provide feedback for in-class questions
  • These activities require more work from the students, but the students report that they feel they are learning more and are more vested in their own learning,"
Troy Patterson

Why Aren't There More Podcasts for Kids? - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...476157

msm329 podcasting

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “A podcast aimed at 3-10-year-olds that parents could actually tolerate—if you could do it right—would be an unbelievable hit,”
  • NPR saw a 75 percent increase in podcast downloads
  • while adults and teens could easily fill their waking hours with audio, kids would struggle to fill a few.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The absence of images in podcasts seems to be a source of their creative potential. Without visuals, listeners are required to fill the gaps—and when these listeners are children, the results can be powerful.
  • Not only are children listening and responding creatively, observations suggest they’re also learning.
  • When it comes to using public radio in the classroom, Brady-Myerov believes three-to-five-minute segments are most effective, leaving the teacher significant time to build a lesson around the audio.
  • That said, a number of schools have already begun incorporating longer podcasts into their curricula, to great success.
  • high-school teachers in California, Connecticut, Chicago, and a handful of other states have been using Radiolab, This American Life, StoryCorps, and, overwhelmingly, Serial.
  • TeachersPayTeachers.com (a site where educators can purchase lesson plans) saw a 21 percent increase in downloads of plans related to podcasts in 2014, and a 650 percent increase in 2015.
  • Research further supports the benefits of audio learning for children. When words are spoken aloud, kids can understand and engage with ideas that are two to three grade-levels higher than their reading level would normally allow.
  • Aural learning is particularly helpful for students who have dyslexia, are blind, or for whom English is their second language, who might struggle with reading or find it helpful to follow a transcript while listening.
Troy Patterson

10 Realities About Bullying at School and Online | MindShift | KQED News - 0 views

ww2.kqed.org/...-bullying-at-school-and-online

msm327

shared by Troy Patterson on 23 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “most educators aren’t aware of the function bullying serves in school,”
  • The majority of kids don’t bully other kids and haven’t been victimized
  • Kids pick on others as a way to secure their standing among their peers or to move up a notch.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • aggression is intrinsic to status and escalates with increases in peer status until the pinnacle of the social hierarchy is attained.”
  • Children from single-parent homes, and those with less educated parents, are no more apt to bully than kids with married and learned parents. African-Americans and other minorities show the same rates of bullying as their white counterparts.
  • The popular notion of bullies as sullen social outcasts who come from broken homes is a myth.
  • What adults call bullying kids call drama.
  • Cyber-bullying is just an extension of what’s happening in the classrooms, halls, and cafeteria
  • online cruelty merely makes visible what kids are doing in person behind the backs of adults.
  • ust another way for kids to express hostility towards targets they’ve already gone after—or are in retaliation against those who have attacked them in school.
  • Kids don’t intervene because doing so would jeopardize their own standing, they lack the tools to assist, and because they don’t think it will help anyway.
  • Adolescents are fixated on their social standing, and anything that jeopardizes their fragile position will be avoided.
  • students receive scant training on how to help in such a way that it won’t backfire.
  • “Asking students to be empowered and responsible bystanders is tantamount to telling them to be good readers or safe drivers without giving them instructions, guidance, and opportunities to practice,”
Troy Patterson

The Principal: The Most Misunderstood Person in All of Education - Kate Rousmaniere - T... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281223

msm265 leadership

shared by Troy Patterson on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In American public schools, the principal is the most complex and contradictory figure in the pantheon of educational leadership.
  • A few years ago when I walked the hallways of a high school with my five-year-old niece Evie, she remarked, without prompting: “There’s the principal’s office: you only go there if you are in trouble.”
  • Most remarkably, those very people who did not understand what a principal did were often the first to argue for the abolition of the role.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The history of the principal offers even more contradictions. Contemporary principals work in the midst of unique modern challenges of ever-changing fiscal supports, school law and policy, community values, and youth culture.
  • The complex role of the principal is not an accidental by-product of history; rather, the principal’s position at the nexus of educational policy and practice was an intentional component of the role when it was originally conceived.
  • Like other middle managers, the principal had a “dual personality,” standing “on the middle ground between management and employee,” as both a loyal sergeant to a distant supervisor and a local administrator who had to negotiate with workers in order to get the job done properly.
  • Through the mid-20th century, the principalship was an inconsistently defined position, as often a teacher with administrative responsibilities as an administrator who supervised teachers.
  • As the principalship evolved away from the classroom to the administrative office, the principal became less connected with student learning, and yet more responsible for it.
  • Modern principals came to have less to do with student learning and more to do with upholding administrative structures and responding to public pressures.
  • For all those efforts, however, the history of the principalship is marked by an increasing discrepancy between the popular image and the actual work of the position. Ironic too, is the dominant image of the principalship with an office, given the great variety, mobility, human interactions, and community relations of principals’ work.
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